1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for non-fry cooking and its uses, and more particularly to a method for non-fry cooking which comprises a step of heating and dehydrating a food material using an aqueous trehalose solution with a relatively-high temperature and concentration, a non-fried food product obtained by the method, and an agent for non-fry cooking comprising trehalose as an effective ingredient.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Frying is a method for cooking using lipids and is daily used like other cooking such as boiling, steaming, and grilling. A cooking like frying is a method to contact/heat food materials with lipids, heated to a relatively-high temperature, to change the food materials from raw conditions to boiled conditions within a relatively-short period of time. More particularly, frying is a cooking for gelatinizing amylaceous substances and denaturing proteins in food materials. In this case, the water in the food materials is contacted with lipids, heated to a relatively-high temperature, and changed into vapor to lose water in whole or in part, resulting in an obtention non-dried foods which have been dehydrated and concentrated, and which the moisture have been replaced with a relatively-large amount of lipids.
In general, fried foods have an enriched taste and can be eaten directly; they can be suitably used as fast foods. The fried foods, however, have the following demerits: Lipids contained in the fried foods are very susceptible to deterioration and change in quality, and this shortens the shelf-life; they contain a relatively-large amount of lipids that may cause in living bodies a nutritional unbalance and an excessive calorie intake when taken excessively; and peroxidized lipids, that are pointed out on their problematic toxicity, are inevitably taken. Now, it is even said that the excessive intake of fried food products may induce life-style related diseases or geriatric diseases.
As a method to improve the above drawbacks, there used a process for non-fried noodles, comprising heating noodles by steaming and drying them.
Conventional non-fried noodles consist of gelatinized amylaceous substances; they cannot be adequately eaten directly and usually should be further processed by cooking and/or seasoning.
Recently, there have been proposed methods for producing dehydrated food products using sugar alcohols of reducing starch hydrolyzates, for example, in Japanese Patent Kokai Nos. 244/87, 258,543/88, 111,863/95, and 131,139/96.
However, the dehydrated food products prepared with the above sugar alcohols were revealed that they usually tend to become hard as if they were coated with hard candies, they easily become sticky by absorbing moisture during storage, they have a characteristic stimulus taste of sugar alcohols, and they are not easily assimilated and absorbed by living bodies to cause diarrhea.